2018-05-29
Eliza’s Furby woke up in the middle of the night, talking loudly in the top of
her wardrobe at 3am. Crazy! I woke up feeling nauseous. Not sure why.
A little work on HackTile, continuing the refactoring work.
Eliza gave a talk on shark culling at school. She made a great powerpoint and
practiced her speech. Proud of her for busting through her nerves and speaking
loudly and confidently in front of her class and teacher.
Pub lunch with Wil. Talk of Amigas and Twin Peaks, naturally. Dinner at
Clancy’s in Freo with Lily and the entire family.
2018-05-28
Wintery day. Took Jack in early so he could do school banking, then off for
grocery shopping before returning home to work. Productive; ended the current
sprint, released to production and started the next. Always feels good.
Some work with the HackTile camera system, to the point where both camera and
entities needed to be refactored out into their own files. Always tending the
garden; need to minimise dependencies and make things neat and tidy. Need an
entity manager to deal with the various entity pools (creating, busy,
destroying, free), and need to support multiple cameras. This is mundane,
humdrum but necessary, and will continue for a day or two.
Leftovers for dinner: lasagna and shepherd’s pie, with fresh salad and steamed
corn on the cob. Jack a bit sleep deprived… being silly and squawky. Eliza in
a bubble of happiness, still riding high after her birthday weekend.
Finished the day with Dzung watching Legion, then washing dishes while listening
to The West Wing Weekly. Still coughing like crazy after this cold.
2018-05-27
Dzung off to the HBF Fun Run, I took the kids to a karate make-up class. Got the
times wrong, so Jack joined Eliza’s lesson. They trained pretty hard today, the
instructor wanted them to break through the wall where the mind wants to give up
but the body can keep going. Jack did great, but said he felt “noise-ious” when
he came to get a drink of water. Eliza’s friends (Cindy x 2 and Zophia) over to
go to birthday lunch at Ruocco’s in Fremantle. Then off for a shopping spree at
Garden City, and back home for cake and afternoon tea.
Did some work on HackTile; started to implement a debug UI, and continued work
on getting the camera hooked up to controller and mouse controls. Once that’s
wrapped I’ll be moving on to adding extra entity states for spawning and
destroying, and will then give these entities some textures and animations :)
2018-05-26
Eliza’s 12th birthday. Kids up early. Presents and breakfast, then took the kids
to Garden City. Jack had a haircut, Eliza bought herself a Pokemon game. Back to
prepare lunch; roast lamb with all the trimmings for 17 of us (both sides of the
family). Played the C64 and the SNES with my brothers. Afternoon spent cleaning
up and making lamb and barley soup for dinner. Played Letter Tycoon with the
kids before they went to bed. Far too tired to work on HackTile; will watch an
episode of The West Wing and crash.
2018-05-25
Very tired today. Slept little partly because I broke my own rules and stayed up
far too late last night (watching The West Wing, listening to The West Wing
Weekly, then listening to music, drinking whiskey, reading), and partly because
I couldn’t stop coughing once I’d gone to bed.
Storm overnight. Heavy rain and strong winds. Feels like winter! Lots of
shopping today for Eliza’s birthday lunch tomorrow. Wrapped her presents and
made a photo collage of her last 11 birthdays, and the day she was born.
Implemented a camera system for HackTile, allowing me to pan and zoom around the
playfield using the XBox controller. Pretty neat. Oh, I promised a screenshot:
Yup, it’s still only Conway’s Life. The red lines show the border between the 4k
texture that represents the entire world. It’s being tiled because the camera is
zoomed way, way out (until each 16x16 pixel entity occupies only a single pixel
on screen). We can zoom way, way in, too, up to 128 times:
Mum and Dad over for Friday night dinner. Finlay for a sleepover. Watched
Wallace and Gromit with popcorn after a stodgy meal of shepherd’s pie, potato
gratin, lasagna and apple tart. Heaven.
2018-05-24
Busy day at work… knocked off a few major tasks, and followed up after a
late-night meeting yesterday with a development team in Chicago.
Battening down the hatches this afternoon in preparation for an overnight storm.
Winter is coming…
HackTile progress. Added vsync to the render loop, and changed the update
function of the engine to allow the CA to update just 10 times per second
(before that, after implementing empty space instead of requiring entities
everywhere, it got up to 160 updates per second). Next on the list is to scroll
and zoom the viewport.
Eliza had Cindy K over after school to do some baking. Jack had an asthma attack
at school after doing cross-country training. And I headed off to the doctor’s
to get some steroids to fight my own asthma (a side-effect of the cold).
Electrician over to fix the power points in Eliza’s room. Dzung very busy at
work; she had a late brunch with April and Mary and then working all day. I made
leftover curry with roti and rice for dinner. Calling it a night early… plan
to veg and get some rest.
2018-05-23
Jack headed off to a whole-day excursion to SciTech. Eliza in early for Japanese
before school begins. Me doing some shallow work in my PJs while Dzung drives
them in.
Have a work meeting scheduled for late tonight, and had trouble this morning
getting motivated to work my regular job (due to politics mostly, we focus on
trivialities which don’t serve to push us towards our goal). So, in penance for
skipping out on HackTile yesterday, I spent some time working on it during the
day. Some progress made; refactored so that the engine creates and destroys
entities in the game, which the game renders. Achieved 55fps with 65536 entities
running Conway’s Life. A screenshot tomorrow, perhaps.
Lunch at a Hawkers place for Laksa, after watching Adam Liaw make a fantastic
version of that dish on YouTube last night.
Health much the same as yesterday. Cleaned up garden. Salmon dish for dinner.